Website visitors demand speed and if they fail to get it, they conveniently move on to the next best website. If your website is one of the slow performers, you will gradually see yourself losing the frequent visitors you once had. Also, fast-loading websites are the ones that get top ranked by the most popular search engines. Clearly, having a fast performing and speedy WordPress website should be on the top of your list.
Want to know how you can get WordPress to operate and perform at top speed? Read on below to discover tips that will help you achieve this objective.
1. Optimize Images
Images tend to take up a large portion of a page and tend to lead to size increments of web pages. This reduces the speed of web pages but if they are optimized by having their size reduced with their quality still intact; this can turn out to avoid speed blockages. EWWW Image Optimizer and WP Smush are two worthy plug-ins that you can use to optimize your images. They will reduce the size of your images and add to the enhancement of your website's speed.
2. Select An Excellent Web Hosting Provider
Shared hosting leads to poor performance as server space is shared with a large amount of websites. It also fails at delivering good loading times and mostly don't even provide any uptime. These things can add up to a website that operates at quite a slow pace. To rectify this, you can purchase cloud servers but having them set up from scratch can be a task quite daunting. Luckily, web hosting providers such as Cloudways can be helpful in their set up.
3. Choose a Lightweight Theme
Did you know? Themes get heavier with social icons, sliders, and widgets and the more heavy your theme, the slower your website speed. Speed up WordPress by making use of the default themes as they are much more lightweight in comparison with the ones including dynamic elements. Foundation and Bootstrap are themes that make use of a good framework and you can opt for these to get the speed of WordPress rolling.
4. Start Using a CDN
Your website receives visitors from different parts of the world and for those that are located at far off distances will experience a slower performing website. This is where Content Delivery Networks (CDN) come in. they keep to a minimum the site loading speed for visitors from various parts of the world. CDNs keep copies of your website in different datacenters all around the world. By using CDN your webpage will be served to visitors from the locations that are nearest to them to provide a speed boost to them. MaxCDN and Cloudflare are good CDNs you can use to improve your WordPress speed for far off visitors.
5. Perform a Database Cleanup
When you perform a database cleanup, unwanted data gets deleted and the size of your backup is greatly reduced. The cleanup you perform will also get rid of fake users, spam-filled comments and unwanted themes and plug-ins. When this happens, the size of your web files and database will decrease and help improve the speed of WordPress.
6. The GZIP Enablement
Enabling GZIP compression will compress a large number of files. When this happens, each time a visitor wants to access your website, the browser they are using will have to first unzip the website. This helps a great deal with lowering the bandwidth usage so that they can access your website without having to wait for a long time. A good plug-in to use in this case is GZip Ninja Speed Optimization.
7. Use Your Plug-Ins Wisely
Web posts and pages comprise of many files, data, plug-ins and parts and caching creates a copy that is fully assembled and presents it to your users, making your site load a great deal faster. Use W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache, which are WordPress caching plug-ins, to make your WordPress website perform at much faster rates.
8. Minimize the Usage Of External Scripts
When external scripts are used on your web pages, they add a huge amount of data to the totality of your loading time. This is why you should minimize the usage of external scripts and include only the ones that are absolutely essential like commenting systems such as Disqus or tracking tools such as Google Analytics. This will help decrease the loading time of your website and keep large chunks of data from ruining the time it takes for your website to open up.
9. Get Rid Of Unwanted Plug-Ins
A large amount of junk gets added to your web files when WordPress websites keep unwanted plug-ins. This generates a large amount of backup files, increasing their size, thus, putting a massive load on to your server resources. The best way to tackle this is by uninstalling or deactivating unwanted and unused plug-ins. You can schedule or automate your tasks instead by using web services like Zapier or IFTTT so that your website may avoid getting burdened with overload.
10. Start Disabling Trackbacks and Pingbacks
Two core components of WordPress, trackbacks and pingbacks send you alerts each time your webpage or blog receives a link. But keeping them on WordPress puts a great deal of strain on to your server resources. This happens because each time someone tries to get linked to your site, requests get generated back and forth from WordPress.
When your server resources get strained, the speed at which they perform decreases to quite an extent and this is why it is best to have trackbacks and pingbacks disabled. You can use Google Webmaster Tools for checking your website links instead.
Start using the tips that have been mentioned above and witness how dramatic enhancements can occur to the speed of your WordPress website, enhancing performance, retaining your loyal visitors, and getting your website to the top ranks of search engines to achieve success.